> What makes you so sure? Just because you 'feel' you are experiencing consciousness doesn't mean other people are. How do you know other people are? By means of objective perspective from your subjective one? By doing so your consciousness already reached out into the material world and so you only validate materialism by acknowledging the presupposed immaterial consciousness of others.

In the response to the original reply of this trhead the proposition that we cannot even be sure of the consciousness in others was one of my main points. I just used "you are having a conscious experience" here for the sake of a conversation that followed with a different person.

> Honestly I don't think either materialism or immaterialism can be argued for without contradictions of some kind because one (immaterialism)

I must say I agree, but would add that instead of immaterialism there are multiple other views, like idealism, dualism, phenomenalism - each rival with one another.

> But why be either/or? Why can't both be valid?

Definitely agree here. I am leaning towards a belief that majority of cultures from the past and present around the world had it right: there is a duality between the body and the mind (or "soul"). We just lost the touch with that second part after trying to explain everything in terms of material things. But we probably reached a gate where materialism breaks down.